Page 41 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Jax

Trust doesn’t erase nerves. It just gives them somewhere safe to land.

Stella walked beside me, not brittle, not running.

The weight in her body was different tonight.

Looser at the edges. She wasn’t trying to outpace me or hold me off with a sharp posture.

She still carried tension, but it bent in a way I hadn’t seen before.

Not defense. Not retreat. Something closer to resolve.

She stopped in the hall, chin tilted, eyes fixed forward. “Can we talk alone?”

Her voice was steady, but her jaw flexed around the last word like it cost her. Not because she doubted me. Because saying it out loud made it real.

My pulse ticked once, low, contained. I nodded. “Of course.”

I didn’t ask where. I already knew. Not the kitchen with Sully’s noise.

Not the lounge where Maddy’s static still lingered.

Not her room, either. She wanted privacy without confinement.

A space that felt contained, but not cornered.

So I led her to the cave, with its cedar walls, low light, and shadows wide enough to hold silence without pressing it into her.

The rest of the house hummed above us; Carrick’s laugh on the stairwell, the shuffle of cabinets, running water, but it all blurred into the backdrop.

All I watched was her. The set of her shoulders.

The way her fingers grazed the wall as we turned the corner, like she needed the texture to keep her grounded in her body.

At the threshold, she paused, scanning the room as though testing it for fractures. Then she walked in first, back straight, chin lifted. A choice, not a mask. I followed slower, settling into the armchair the way I always did. No leaning forward. No reaching out. Just present.

She stayed standing for a moment, hands curling slightly at her sides, like she was holding something fragile and deciding if it was strong enough to survive air. When she turned toward me, her eyes were clear. Nervous, yes. But trusting.

Her voice came low, certain even with the tremor beneath it. “That night. With the rope.” She drew a breath, steady but tight. “I wasn’t okay.”

The words landed clean and heavy, like a blade placed carefully in my hands with the expectation that I wouldn’t drop it. I didn’t. But the shift was immediate, the weight of what she gave me settling between us without drama or apology. Just truth, raw-edged and unflinching.

She stayed standing, arms folded. Her posture was rigid, feet rooted, like moving might unravel the courage it took to open her mouth.

The storm behind her eyes hadn’t broken, but it moved there, steady and certain, riding the tremor in her skin.

Her body balanced on the line between past and present, between defense and the terrifying possibility of surrender.

I anchored myself in stillness, not absence, but steadiness. A counterweight, not a cage. A presence she could push against without meeting resistance.

This wasn’t a conversation yet. It was an agreement.

Trust wouldn’t be extracted. Her pain wouldn’t be interpreted.

She needed to inhabit the space without being pulled toward explanation.

So I watched the signals instead. The slow rise of her breath, the way her jaw worked like she was testing words that hadn’t settled into language yet.

Stella never left her body. She didn’t dissociate. She endured, survived, with a clarity that made detachment look like cowardice. But tonight, it wasn’t just endurance. She was pressing against the walls, testing the structure, seeing if the room, and I, could hold her without collapse.

I didn’t reach for her. Didn’t soften my tone. Even kindness offered too soon could register as pressure. And she’d had enough of that. Her agency had been taken before. I would not be another hand dressed in care while closing around her will.

When she spoke again, it was quiet, but precise. “It felt good. Until it didn’t. And I couldn’t tell you when that changed.”

Suddenly, the way the scene had played out made more sense.

The thing that had caused her to call a safeword wasn’t invalidation, just disruption.

The pleasure hadn’t disappeared. It had been overridden.

My chest ached, but my thoughts moved quickly, layering meaning over memory.

She hadn’t dissociated from the start; it had happened mid-scene.

A breath. A rope placement. A shift in tone.

Something had pulled her backward, away from the present and into a room she’d barely survived.

And I’d been the one holding her when it happened.

She looked at me then. Not hesitant, just braced. Her gaze held weight sharpened by decision, like she was ready to say the worst part aloud.

“I felt like I was back in that room again. Not yours. Theirs.”

The word landed clean and deliberate. Not “his.” Theirs. She didn’t need to explain it. I understood exactly what that room had taken from her.

Still, she was careful not to place the blame on me.

“I knew it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “But my body didn’t. It panicked.”

Her cognitive awareness had lasted just long enough to name the difference, but her nervous system had already decided. Flashback latency. No malice. No red flags. Just a body trying to protect itself from something it couldn’t categorize.

“I couldn’t pull myself out fast enough,” she said, her voice soft but steady.

That was all I needed to hear.

I could’ve said something then—something comforting or polished, the kind of line passed between well-meaning men in my field who think kindness is enough when they’re out of their depth.

But she hadn’t come for comfort. She didn’t want guilt or apologies.

She wanted clarity. She was testing whether I could meet her in the truth—precisely, cleanly, without flinching.

So I gave her what mattered.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, voice level, shaped like fact rather than comfort. “Your body did what it was trained to do. It followed the pattern stress had encoded. It got you out. That’s not a failure. That’s function.”

She didn’t answer or react. But she breathed, slower, deeper. The kind that starts low, deliberate, as if her lungs were finally receiving the message her brain couldn’t yet translate.

“And I didn’t catch up fast enough,” I said. “That’s not your fault. That’s mine.”

She didn’t speak, but her body shifted. Her fingers loosened. Her posture eased, a slight change in how she carried herself. Subtle. But I saw it.

I didn’t offer an apology. Not because I wasn’t sorry, but because apologies center the wrong person.

I’d learned that lesson early. Guilt was only useful when it built something better.

She didn’t need regret. She needed recalibration.

A different process. A better response, built from better data.

I’d rebuild every system I had if it meant she could feel safe inside her own skin.

Because I saw her. Every piece. And I stayed.

When she opened her mouth, I caught the flicker in her jaw just before the words could surface.

The reflex to soften the moment, to take the weight off me, to insist it wasn’t my fault.

But that wasn’t true. And it wouldn’t help her.

So I stepped in. Not to steer the moment.

Just to keep her from carrying what wasn’t hers.

“I don’t want you to comfort me,” I said, low and steady. “I want to understand you.”

That stopped her. Froze her, like I’d flipped a switch.

Most people want comfort. They want to hear it wasn’t their fault.

They want closure dressed up as mutual apologies, passed back and forth like peace offerings to avoid the wreckage underneath.

But not me. I didn’t want absolution. I wanted comprehension.

I wanted to know the cause, the sequence, the shape of what went wrong.

Because when I understood the full framework, I could rewrite the outcome.

She wasn’t just another system to study.

She was the one I refused to misread twice.

“That night didn’t fail because of what happened,” I said, voice low and deliberate.

“It failed because I didn’t have enough data.

” I let the words sit in the space between us, stripped of drama, and I watched the way they landed.

Her brow eased, her weight tilted forward just slightly, like her listening had shifted into something deeper.

“Consent isn’t a fixed point,” I said. “It changes. With nervous system state, with memory, with capacity. That night I tracked your external cues. But I missed your internal override.” I wasn’t apologizing.

I was diagnosing. “I missed the breath pattern shift. I missed the delay between touch and response. I misread your stillness as surrender, when it was static. That wasn’t your failure to signal.

That was my failure to read you with the right system. ”

Her gaze held steady, unmoving. I couldn’t tell if anyone had ever spoken to her this way before; not emotionally, but clinically.

Not as someone fragile, but as someone worth getting exactly right.

I wasn’t here to romanticize her pain or minimize it.

I was here to name it. To study it. To meet it with precision.

“I don’t want to fix you,” I said. “I want to fix what I’m building with you.” She didn’t respond. Her throat shifted like she was holding something in, but her stillness wasn’t resistance; it was weight. Thought. It was the gravity of being seen clearly, and not having to brace for distortion.

“I want to rebuild everything,” I said. “Strip it down to the bones. Reassemble it in a way that reflects your truth. Not just what you say, but how you breathe, how your body speaks when your voice goes quiet. No assumptions. We track. We adapt. We build it solid.” I paused, then added more quietly, “I want it to be safe enough that you might want it again.”